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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

There are some important differences:

* there is a finite amount of land that costs a certain amount to police

* landowners pay property taxes to cover these kind of costs to society, and land which they don't pay taxes on reverts to the state

* there is a registry of land ownership so it's easy to tell who owns a particular piece of land

* common land is at huge risk of a literal tragedy of the commons, historically through things like overgrazing (the original justification for enclosures - which absolutely were controversial at the time and did need to be empirically justified). In modern times, if one person builds a building on a piece of land another person can't. That's simply not the case for "intellectual property".

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That brings up a fun idea. Why not have 'intellectual property tax' along with the yearly expiration.

That would solve the orphaned works issue- an orphaned work would quickly return to the public domain after falling behind on tax.

It'd also give creators of non-orphaned work the impetus to let go of their copyright.

And it might be possible to scale the tax by some factor that would give 'Big Content' a bigger incentive to let go, while levying a nominal cost on individuals that would function more as a tripwire for orphaned works than a financial burden.

You know what would encourage big content to let go of works? A tax that increases every year that copyrighted work is kept under copyright.

That way if it's not valuable to them they will let it go instead of hoarding it all forever.

What is the jurisdiction? What counts as a unit of copyrightable work? Are we obligated to accept work copyrighted in another county or state as being copyrighted in ours? If yes, what can we do about jurisdictions that set absurdly low tax rates (see race to the bottom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom )?

I guess I should be explicit. My fear is that states will race to the bottom and charge $0.0001 per page per year which will lead to aggregation of perpetual copyright into the hands of copyright trolls.

I am sorry but why does Mickey Mouse deserve perpetual protection under copyright? Why does Disney get to write our copyright laws and dictate foreign policy so much?

> I am sorry but why does Mickey Mouse deserve perpetual protection under copyright?

Why does your grandfather's farm deserve perpetual protections as he hands it down over generations? Or put another way, why does anyone else deserve any rights over Mickey Mouse when Disney is the one that created him?

Sure, what if no-one had any rights over Mickey Mouse? Everyone would be free to use him however they liked. (There are specific issues when you do that with land, but as far as I can tell none of them apply to copyright.)

I agree. I shouldn't be able to sell rusty vans with the Mickey Mouse logo on them claiming that they are made by Disney. Or claim that my shitty b-grade movies were made by DisNEY (TRADEMARK)

Trademark law is largely good law that we should retain. Copyright law is largely not. Talk of "intellectual property" obfuscates the distinction.

Trademark has much more substantial free speech issues than copyright.

Personally, the only part of trademark I care about is impersonation. It should be illegal to claim that Google was involved in building my shitty products.

My grandfather's farm could not be copied and distributed 1000000 times over with a few cents worth of electricity and a glass fiber. If you take my grandfather's farm, he is no longer able to use it for farming.

Copyrights and patents were created specifically for the purpose of recouping development costs that are otherwise non-recoverable by the more obvious laws of microeconomics.

You're not just comparing apples and oranges. You're comparing actual apples to poems that rhyme the word orange.

Because Mickey Mouse is an idea while a farm is not. Claiming ownership of metaphysical concepts like Mickey Mouse is very different from claiming ownership of something that's scarce and rivalrous such as the farm.

Actually, perpetual property rights and unclear title are a huge problem with real estate and capital formation in South America especially. See Hernando de Soto's Mystery of Capital or Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money.

Perpetuities ultimately end up with contending claims. Adjudicating those is tremendously expensive.

The better question is, why does Disney deserve special rights to Mickey Mouse just because he was the first one with the idea? There is no natural right to an idea the same way there is a natural right to physical property. It's a fiction we came up with because we wanted to see creators compensated for their work. I'm all in favor of the general purpose of copyright, but ideas are inherently non-exclusive things, and any argument based on the opposite assumption is flawed on its face.

What is a "natural right" and who decided it applies to physical property but not ideas? And why is the "natural right" based on the ease of copying something, rather than the word work necessary to bring that thing into existence in the first place? To me, it just seems like you're using the concept as a "because I say so" distinction.

The go-to for people who oppose a moral basis for copyright is the ease of copying intangible versus physical goods, but to me it's a nonsense argument. The ease of copying goes to the enforceability of any monopoly on a thing--it does not go to determining the justification for granting a monopoly on a thing to begin with.

I think you actually understand the philosophical basis of property and why it doesn't apply to ideas better than you're letting on here, but I'll answer this anyway.

Ownership of physical property is natural because physical property is inherently rivalrous and excludable — if you take my hammer, I can't use it, and thus I need to keep my hammer in my shed if I want to have access to it when I need it. Ownership makes natural sense there. It's essential to security.

Ideas are not the same way. Any number of people can think an idea, and in fact an idea becomes just as much a part of everyone who thinks it as the first person who thought it, and you literally can't take an idea back once you have shared it. Ideas are not just easy to copy, they aren't even entities that need copying. The mind is constantly taking in and assimilating ideas and creating its own.

I'm not actually against copyright. I think there is a sound moral basis for it, in that otherwise an increasing number of people wouldn't be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I just don't think there is a moral justification for the tortured concept of eternal copyright. Eventually, any successful idea will become so diffused throughout society that it's just an utter farce to pretend it is not part of the commons.

If nothing else, infinitely decreasing the number of ideas that may be legally had is so harmful to society that it outweighs any good that could possibly come from it. In other words, even if we say "Sure, let's pretend treating ideas as property is a natural fit," the Lockean Proviso warns us against allowing them to remain property forever.

> I think you actually understand the philosophical basis of property and why it doesn't apply to ideas better than you're letting on here, but I'll answer this anyway.

> Ownership of physical property is natural because physical property is inherently rivalrous and excludable

While that's one philosophical justification for property, we've had property long before anyone coined the phrases "rivalrous" or "excludable" and it has been justified for reasons that have nothing to do with those economic concepts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_property. Going back further, see Psalm 128:2 ("For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.")

Indeed, and I even referred to the labor justification later on (i.e. copyright is a good thing because creators are entitled to the fruits of their labor). But it's still an unnatural fit, because unlike things that the labor theory of property has traditionally been applied to, ideas are inherently shared, or I suppose you could say created in the head of each person exposed to them. To claim ownership over other people's minds is far, far beyond anything John Locke or King David ever contemplated.

Ideas are just inherently unlike physical property on a very fundamental level. If my neighbor lends me his hammer, I can give it back. If my neighbor lends me an idea, it never left him, but I still can't ever rid myself of it.

No matter how much I care about content creators being compensated fairly — and I do, both for philosophical and selfish reasons — it is a farce to pretend an idea that exists in everyone's heads and originated in none of them is the exclusive property of one person. It is simply unnatural in a way that physical property isn't.

> I suppose you could say created in the head of each person exposed to them.

I created Harry Potter, not J.K. Rowlings? My labor in reading the novels is equal to her labor in writing them?

I think that argument falls flat particularly with copyright because there is no copyright liability in the face of independent creation. Copyright doesn't prevent anyone from owning their original ideas, even if other people independently think of the same idea.

Just curious, have you ever read any Joseph Campbell? He does a better job explaining my "You didn't build that" argument than I can.

> if you take my hammer, I can't use it

So with that hammer you build products that you might sell and I might want to buy with my money that I got from selling my idea. But if you 'take' my idea I will have to get a new hammer just the same. There are infinitely many hammers as there are infinitely many ideas, but getting new one takes nontrivial amount of effort for both cases. The fact that one is tangible is in my opinion an arbitrary property for the purpose of this discussion.

Well Disney is dead, so are you saying that all rights to restrict the use of his copyright works should also have died?

The reason others are owed rights is that copyright, as with patents, is a contract between the state and the creator/inventor. Part of the deal is that creators get copyright protection in return for the eventual entry of the work in to the public domain - they pay off the demos with that promise.

State doesn't owe creators of works protection naturally. If creators want to not have a limited right to exclusive use they should be allowed to give that up and then the state should exclude itself from any actions against people who copy that work.

To recapitulate: if you don't want to 'buy' copyright protection with eventual movement of your work in to the public domain then you can instead have that work freely copyable - without tort - based on the ability of anyone who sees/uses it. Without ready movement of works in to the public domain the public are being ripped off, the contract is broken and the public then should consider those works copyable without the possibility of a claim of tort.

If creators want to not have a limited right to exclusive use they should be allowed to give that up

They are. All someone has to do is include in it a statement to the effect of 'I waive my copyright interest in this work and hereby donate it to the public domain.' There is no bar on voluntary placement of work into the public domain; it just doesn't happen that often because when publishers write checks to authors they're purchasing the right to exploit the work commercially. Authors could grant publishers limited licenses to do so and then stipulate that the work would fall into the public domain after a certain date, but that would result in lowered payments from publishers, plus it creates an incentive for the publisher to under-market the work or even withhold it from sale, and then publish it once it enters the public domain without paying anything in royalties.

There are some publishers that make good money of just republishing historical works, even without exclusivity. Some people want a good-quality facsimile of an old book. Dover paperbacks springs to mind.

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